News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Google & Apple Boost Local AR, Foursquare’s New Location-Based Creative
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Report: Smartphones, Developer Kits Drive Local AR and Visual Search… Foursquare’s New In-House Agency Will Pump Out Location-Based Creative… Marketers Still Shy Away from Venturing Too Deep into Ad Tech…
Street Fight Daily: Scandal Fails to Dent Facebook’s Growth, AI Biz Expected to Boom
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Increased Facebook Ad Prices Drive Revenue Growth… Gartner Expects the AI Business Market to Grow 70% This Year… Advertisers, Agencies Agree Transparency in Ad Buying Is A Problem, But Disagree on the Blame…
Commentary
Patch CCO Talks Election Coverage: Virtual News Teams, Trending Hashtag
The election was a big national story, but it was also an important local story — and served as yet another crucible to test how deeply hyperlocal network Patch has woven itself into the 850+ communities it serves across the country. Rachel Feddersen, Patch’s Chief Content Officer, spoke with Street Fight this week about how the network approached and executed its election coverage, and what potential lessons the event had for the rest of the news cycle.
Memo to Google: Solve the Local Data Problem With Local Data
I think we can now state definitively that the big upsurge in claimed listings that might have occurred as a result of Google’s choice to embed local listings within its social network, a little over five months ago, will not happen on its own. Rather than achieving Facebook levels of adoption, Google+ Local is still an arena where participation depends heavily on early adopters as well as the assistance of local SEO consultants and companies like mine…
As Paywalls Evolve, So Does the Perception of Paywalls
It’s time to acknowledge that, overall, people are starting to get used to paying for content online — especially on smartphones and tablets. It will be interesting to see how the various paywall models play out over time, but I have become more confident that paywalls (in some form or fashion) are a piece of the puzzle to running a profitable hyperlocal or regional news website…
Latest Posts
How One Startup Uses Carrier Data For Real-World Analytics
For the most part, in-store tracking startups rely on a device in-store — a wireless router, video camera, or bluetooth beacon — to count customers as they shop. But Canadian startup Viasense has created a new system using existing data from cellular networks to provide businesses with information about their foot traffic — and, more importantly, where that traffic goes next…
Street Fight Daily: Instagram Tests Facebook Places, GOP Hails Uber
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Instagram Testing Facebook Places Integration to Replace Foursquare (Fast Company)… GOP Hails App-Based Taxi Service Uber, Says Regulations Stifle It (Wall Street Journal)… Cloud POS Startup Vend Raises $20M From Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures And Square Peg Capital (TechCrunch)…
5 Local Marketplaces for Childcare Services
What Taskrabbit has done for household errands, Uber has done for transportation, and ZocDoc has done for local physician services, a handful of hyperlocal vendors are aiming to now do for childcare. By harnessing the power of social recommendations and connecting parents with babysitters in their own communities, local marketplaces for childcare services are harnessing technology to facilitate online networking within physical communities…
A New Way to Think About Local: Last Mile Advertising
While advertisers today seek to take advantage of an increasingly fragmented media environment, those focused on local advertising have different challenges and opportunities in that they are in closer proximity to the point of purchase. Even with the tremendous growth of online shopping and e-commerce, two-thirds of all local purchases are still taking place in-person at brick-and-mortar locations…
Street Fight Daily: GrubHub Prices IPO, Flurry Tracks Users Offline
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… GrubHub Sets Price Range for I.P.O. (New York Times)… Flurry Launches Service to Track Mobile App Users, Offline (AdAge)… China Set to Cap Transfers Using Mobile-Payment Services (Wall Street Journal)…
With Partnerships, YP’s Consumer Product Takes a Back Seat
Last week, YP announced a deal with Yelp in which the Yellow Pages spin-off will sell Yelp’s core advertising product to the company’s small business clients. For YP, and its owner Cerberus Capital, the agreement is the culmination of a deeper strategic push and a tacit acknowledgment that its role as leading consumer brand, which defined its print past, might be waning…
5 Tools to Collect Customer Data Using Checkout Technology
Ecommerce retailers have always had a leg up on brick-and-mortar businesses when it comes to collecting data about their customers’ shopping behaviors and buying habits, but now a group of hyperlocal vendors is providing offline merchants with similar sets of tools. These vendors are using data from a merchant’s POS system to build detailed customer profiles, even in an offline environment…
Street Fight Daily: Sprint Eyes Small Business, PayPal Tracks In-Store Visits
Probabilistic Device Matching Isn’t Perfect — But It Works
The use of probabilistic matching or statistical IDs to link multiple devices to an individual is often dismissed based on dubious accuracy. It’s true that the practice will never be 100% accurate, but even taking the conservative estimate at the lower end of this range, probabilistic matching enables marketers to scale their mobile advertising campaigns with reasonable expectations of performance…
Discovering Common Ground Among ‘Indie’ and Corporate Hyperlocal Sites
The digital Grand Canyon that has divided independent and corporate hyperlocal news sites is not looking so immense lately. The “indies” and the corporates are still kicking up a lot of dust in their community-by-community competition. But these rivals are changing their operations and strategies in ways that make them look more alike than different…
Street Fight’s Big 3
Street Fight Columns
Street Fight Categories
Scaling Seasonal SEO Across Locations With AI Insights